LinkedIn has released the latest 'improvement' for her group functionality.

  • "We cannot wait to demonstrate the new version of our groups!", they said...
  • "We want to improve the interaction between group members", they said...
  • "You will now receive notifications of the activities in your group", they said...
  • "You will get better ways to manage your group", they said...
  • "We understand how important group managers are for the success of groups", they said...

Developing in OPS

Well, they didn't just develop - test - release their new functions... No, they simply killed the essential community management functions, and insult the people that made these groups great platforms for exchanging knowledge in a business context. They simply released a new version that lost most of the essential management functions a group manager needs.

They will start rebuilding these functions somewhere in the next half year, and in the mean time group managers may to spend the additional effort to keep their groups clean from spam, manage the requests to join, manage the moderated postings, etc.

Agile strategy?

Was that the effect of an agile strategy, in their DevOps teams? We've seen this before: agile DevOps teams rolling out new functionality to customer groups, without testing it, without communicating with the customers, just releasing it to see how the customer responds to new ideas of software developers... and when the customer cleans the software by taking over the test responsibility, they think "job wel done".

The mess the made

This is what LinkedIn did:

  1. Group managers can no longer see who wants to join their group unless they actively search for new requests on a continual base
  2. Group managers can no longer moderate their streams until it's too late; members can no longer be put under moderation. In terms of preventing spam, this truely is a 'group killer'.
  3. Group managers have entirely lost their list of moderated members, so they will now again be confronted with the spam behavior of these people, and they will have to remove and block them definitely - but after the fact. In the mean time all group members will be confronted with their spam.
  4. Group managers can no longer see that a moderated member has posted a contribution that may deliver value to the other group members - unless they actively search for new postings on a continual base.
  5. Group managers can no longer manage a welcoming message to explain group rules to new members.
  6. Group managers need to hit links and buttons many times before they can do anything, which means they will at least quadruple their efforts to manage their groups.
  7. Group manager can no longer see the list of groups they manage: all groups are now in one long list.

Thank you, LinkedIn. Agile rules!